What I Am Made Of

It’s just a sad fact: we forget sooooo easily.

A couple of years ago, the Lord told me clearly that He was going to use a certain character trait of mine, and He went so far as to give me a few specifics about how He was going to use it. That was great. It was great in part because I had, over the years, taken some flak for that particular tendency. In essence, the Lord was telling me that what some people perceived as being a fault was actually a desirable and good characteristic.

This morning I realized that for the past several months, and very noticeably in the past few weeks, I have been demonstrating the exact opposite, in my life. It is, to be quite blunt, awful. It is also very useful.

Once again, the Lord is reminding me what I am made of.

You see, I have found that I really can’t have full confidence in anything I do unless I’m fully convinced that it has God’s approval. I have to know He’s behind me all the way. If I don’t, I get shaky. So here we have this particular thing, which has been roundly criticized by someone who has had a lot of influence in my life. If I’m going to have confidence in it, then, I need to know not only that God intends to use it, but that God put it in me in the first place.

How better to accomplish that then to take it away, so that I can clearly see that without God breathing life into it, it is dead.

The really fun part of this is that I just finished writing a little blurb on the impropriety of giving God credit for our failures. This, then, becomes a great example of that. Has God been involved in the non-functionality—the failure, you might say—of this strength that I have? Absolutely He has. I know that without a doubt. Have I failed to display this strength because I was hearing and obeying God’s voice? Definitely not. In fact, I’m convinced that such was precisely the point of this exercise. I had reached the point of vaguely believing that I was just that way, and I didn’t really need God’s help in that particular thing. He was showing me that unless I listened to and obeyed His voice, this particular gift could not function or bear fruit in my life. He was proving to me that without Him, I would fail.

The truth is that we all stumble and we all slip, and the even greater truth is that God is not angry about that. He’s a lot more interested in constant contact than He is in perfect performance. But He knows better than we know that if we don’t know how much we need Him, we’ll turn away from Him. So He’ll temporarily remove something He gave us, so we can see what it is we’re really made of.

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